On the other hand, anyone enquiring as to the general premises of relief in the age of its technical intensification would receive the best answers from the French early socialists, specifically Saint-Simon and his school, in whose publications – their journal was not named Le Globe for nothing – one can find the first elements of an explicit politics of pampering from a genre-theoretical perspective. It is from Saint-Simonism that the formula of the era of relief, still valid to this day in theory and practice, originates; it states that with the rise of major industries in the eighteenth century, the time had come to end the ‘exploitation of man by man’, replacing it with the methodical exploitation of the earth by humans. In the present context we can acknowledge the epochal content of this formulation: through its use, the human race, represented by its avant-garde (the classes of the industriels), is identified as the beneficiary of a comprehensive relief movement – or, in the terminology of the time, as the subject of an emancipation. Its goal was expressed in the secular-evangelical reference to the resurrection of the flesh during one's lifetime.
Such a thing was only conceivable on the condition that the typical distribution of weight in agro-imperial class societies, namely the relief and release of the ruling few through the exploitation of the serving many, could be revised thanks to the relief of all classes through a new universal servant: the earth of resources, taken over using large-scale technology. What the Saint-Simonist keyword ‘exploitation’ means in process-logical terms could only be articulated once the philosophical anthropology of the twentieth century, especially in the wake of Arnold Gehlen's efforts, had developed a sufficiently abstract concept of relief.1 Since this concept became available to the cultural sciences, it has been possible to formulate general statements about the evolutionary direction of high-tech social complexes that are substantially more practical in systemic and psychological terms than the palpably naïve nineteenth-century theses on emancipation and progress. If one ties both the phenomenon and the concept of relief back to Saint-Simon's exploitation, it becomes evident that the effect in question cannot be achieved for the many without a shift of exploitation to a new ‘down below’.
Against this background, it can be argued that all narratives about the changes in the human condition are narratives about the changing exploitation of energy sources – or descriptions of metabolic regimes.2 This claim is not only one dimension more general than the Marx–Engels dogma that all history is the history of class struggles; it is also far closer to the empirical findings. Its generality extends further because it encompasses both natural and human energies (‘labour power’); it is closer to the facts because it rejects the bad historicism of the doctrine that all states of human culture are connected in a single evolutionary sequence of conflicts; and, in addition, it does not distort the existing data despite its high level of abstraction. Such a distortion can be found in the polemogenic didacticism of The Communist Manifesto, which passed over the reality of class compromises in order to generalize the comparably rare phenomenon of open class struggles – at the risk of ascribing exemplary significance to the slave and peasant revolts of earlier history, along with their desperate, undirected and often vandalous tendencies, for the redistribution struggles of wage earners.
The narrative of the exploitation of energy sources reaches its current hot spot as soon as it approaches the event complex known in both older and newer social history as the ‘Industrial Revolution’ – a misnomer, we now know, as this too was by no means a ‘radical change’ in which above and below change places; rather, it made explicit the manufacture of products using mechanical substitutes for human movements. The key to the transition from human labour to machine labour (and to new human–machine co-operations) lies in the coupling of power systems with executive systems. Such couplings had usually remained latent in the age of physical labour, in that the worker themselves, as a biological energy converter, embodied the unity of the power system and the executive system. Once a far-reaching leap of innovation had taken place in mechanical power systems, however, they could advance to the stage of explicit working-out.
Thus begins the epic of motors: with their construction, a new generation of heroic agents stepped onto the stage of civilization, a generation whose appearance radically changed the energetic rules of play in conventional cultures. Since the advent of motors, even physical and philosophical principles such as force, energy, expression, action and freedom have taken on radically new meanings. Although their forces are normally tamed ones, bourgeois mythology has never completely lost sight of their unbound, potentially disastrous side, underlining this with throwbacks to the pre-Olympian race of violent Titanic deities. Hence the profound fascination with exploding machines, indeed with explosions in general.
Since the neo-titans appeared in the midst of modern lifeworlds, nations have changed into immigration countries for machinery. A motor is, in a sense, a headless energy subject brought into existence out of interest in the use of its power. It only possesses those attributes of the perpetrator, however, that still cling to the impulses without being burdened with elaborations or reflections. As a beheaded subject, the motor does not move from theory to practice, but rather from standstill to operation. In motors, the shift that has to be effected through disinhibition in human subjects who are meant to take action is triggered by the starting mechanism. Motors are perfect slaves, for there are no complications through human rights concerns if one makes them work day and night. They do not listen to abolitionist preachers who have a dream: the dream of a not-too-distant day when motors and their owners have the same rights, and the children of humans and machines play with one another.
To integrate motors systematically as cultural agents, one requires fuels of a very different nature from the foodstuffs with which human and animal bearers of muscular work were kept alive in the agro-imperial world. Thus the most dramatic sections in the epic of motors are the cantos on energy. One can go so far as to ask whether the formulation of the abstract, homogeneous energy principle – energy sans phrase – by modern physics is not merely the scientific reflex of the principle of motorization, whereby the aspecific coupling of nutrition and organism was replaced by the precise relation between fuel and machinery. The evacuation of power from the organism begins a passage in the grand narrative of the procedures and stages of energy source exploitation that meets all the requirements for dictating a permanent final chapter.
The grand narrative of relief among the moderns begins, as we know, with the account of the massive invasion by the first generation of mechanical slaves, which were naturalized from the eighteenth century onwards under the name ‘steam engines’ in the burgeoning industrial landscapes of North-western Europe. Mythological associations were particularly obvious in the case of these new agents, as their operating principle – the expansion pressure of the trapped water vapour – immediately recalls the Titans of Greek theogony, who were condemned to subterranean bondage. As water vapour initially comes from the combustion of coal (it was only with the thermonuclear power plants of the twentieth century that a completely new agent was introduced), this fossil fuel had to become the heroic energy-bearer of the nascent Industrial Age. It is one of the numerous ‘dialectics’ of modernity that coal, that powerful pampering agent, usually had to be extracted through the inferno-like labours of underground mining. Thus the miners of the coal-hungry nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could be presented as living proof of the Marxist thesis that the wage labour contract was nothing but the legal mask of a new slavery. This Promethean coal was joined from the later nineteenth century on by rock oils and natural gases as further fossil carriers of energy – likewise relieving and pampering agents of the highest order. Their extraction required overcoming obstacles to development of a different kind from those encountered in underground mining. Occasionally, the process of acquiring them displayed an effect that one is inclined to call an accommodation by nature, as if it wished to make a contribution of its own to ending the agriculturally defined age of scarcity and its reflection in ontologies of lack and miserablisms.
The primal scene of this accommodation of human demand by natural resources took place in 1859 in Pennsylvania, when the first oil well was uncovered near Titusville, and with it the first great oil field of the New World, in a very shallow layer barely more than twenty metres below ground. Since then the image of the eruptive oil well, known among experts as a ‘gusher’, has been one of the archetypes not only of the American Dream, but of the modern way of life as such, which was opened up by easily accessible energies. The petroleum bath is the baptism of the contemporary human being – and Hollywood would not be the central issuing facility of our valid myths had it not shown one of the great heroes of the twentieth century, James Dean, bathing in his own oil well as the star of Giant (1955). The continuously growing influx of energy from so far unexhausted fossil stores not only enabled constant ‘growth’ – positive feedbacks between work, science, technology and consumption over more than a quarter of a century – together with the implications I have described as the psychosemantic modification of populations through prolonged relieving and pampering effects; it also included such venerable categories of Old European ontology as being, reality and freedom in an abrupt change of meaning.
Thus the concept of the real has now come to include the activist connotation that things could always be different (of which only artists, as guardians of the sense of possibility, have so far had any intimation), in contrast to the view held by tradition, where references to reality were always infused with the pathos of not possibly being any other way. As a result, the concept demanded submission to the power of finitude, harshness and lack. For an entire age, for example, a phrase like ‘crop failure’ was loaded with the admonitory severity of the classical doctrine of the real. In its way, it reminds us that the ruler of this world can only be death – supported by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, his seasoned entourage. In a world situation like that of today, characterized by the fundamental experience of surplus energy, the ancient and medieval dogma of resignation has lost its validity; now there are new degrees of freedom whose effects extend to the level of existential moods. Small wonder, then, that Catholic theology, which essentially thinks in premodern and miserablist terms, has completely forfeited its connection to the facts of the present – even more than the Calvinist and Lutheran doctrines, which at least take a semi-modern approach. Accordingly, the concept of freedom also had to break away from its conventional meanings over the last hundred years. It makes new dimensions of meaning sound on its current overtone rows, especially the definition of freedom as the right to unlimited mobility and festive squandering of energy.3 Thus two former lord's prerogatives, namely gratuitous freedom of movement and whimsical spending, are democratically generalized at the expense of a subservient nature – only, of course, where the climatic conditions of the great hothouse are already in force. Because modernity as a whole constitutes a figure on a background of the primary colour abundance, its denizens are challenged by the feeling of constant dissolutions of boundaries. They can and must acknowledge that their lives fall into a time without normality. They pay for their thrownness into the world of excess with the feeling that the horizon is drifting.
The sensitive zone in the reprogramming of existential moods in modernity thus concerns the experience of de-scarcification encountered early on by the inhabitants of the crystal palace – and which they barely ever acknowledge sufficiently. The sense of reality among people in the agro-imperial age was attuned to the scarcity of goods and resources, being based on the experience that their labour, embodied in arduous farming, was just enough to place precarious islands of human artificiality in nature. This was already addressed in the ancient theories of ages, which bear resigned witness to the fact that even the great empires crumble, and the most arrogant towers are levelled by inexorable nature within a few generations. Agrarian conservatism expressed its ecological-moral conclusions in a categorical ban on wastefulness. Because the product of labour could not usually be increased, only augmented by looting at best, people in the ancient world were aware at all times that produced value was a limited, relatively constant factor that had to be protected at all costs. Under these conditions, the squanderer must have been considered insane. The narcissistic profligacies of noble lords could thus only be taken as acts of hubris – and their later reinterpretation as ‘culture’ could not yet be predicted.
These views were invalidated when, with the breakthrough to the fossil-fuelled style of culture a little more than two centuries ago, a sinister liberalism appeared on the scene and resolutely began to overturn all the criteria. While wastefulness had traditionally been the ultimate sin against subsistence, as it jeopardized the constantly scarce supply of survival means, the age of fossil energy saw a thoroughgoing change in the meaning of wastefulness: we can now calmly term it the first civic duty. Not that supplies of goods and energies have grown into the infinite overnight; but the fact that the limits of the possible are constantly pushed further away gives the ‘meaning of being’ a fundamentally altered complexion. Now only Stoics still count the stocks; for the ordinary Epicureans in the great comfort hothouse, the ‘stocks’ are the very things that one can assume are infinitely duplicable. Within a few generations, the collective willingness to consume more was able to ascend to the level of a system premise: mass frivolity is the psychosemantic agent of consumerism. Its blossoming indicates how recklessness is now in the position of the fundamental. The ban on wastefulness has been replaced by the ban on frugality, expressed in the perpetual appeals to encourage domestic demand. Modern civilization is based less on ‘humanity's exit from its self-inflicted unproductiveness’4 than on the constant influx of an undeserved wealth of energy into the space of entrepreneurship and experience.
In a genealogy of the wastefulness motif, it would have to be noted how deeply the verdict of tradition on the luxurious, leisurely and superfluous was rooted in theological value judgements. In the official monotheistic view, everything superfluous could only be displeasing to God and nature – as if they were also counting the stocks.5 It is notable that even the proto-liberal Adam Smith, as willing as he is to sing the praises of the luxury-stimulated markets, clings to a markedly negative concept of wastefulness – which is why his treatise on The Wealth of Nations is pervaded by the refrain that wastefulness is a submission to the ‘passion for present enjoyment’.6 It belongs to the habitus of ‘unproductive hands’ – priests, aristocrats and soldiers – who, on account of a long-entrenched arrogance, follow the belief that they are called upon to waste the riches generated by the productive majority.
Marx likewise remains bound by the wastefulness concept of the agro-imperial age when, following in Smith's footsteps, he adheres to the distinction between the working and wasting classes, albeit with the nuance that now the owners of capital, far ahead of the feudal ‘parasites’, occupy the role of malign squanderers. At least he agrees with Smith in conceding that the new economic methods have brought a surplus product into the world that goes beyond the narrow surplus ranges of agrarian times. The author of Capital stylizes his bourgeois as a vulgarized aristocrat whose greed and baseness know no bounds. This portrait of the capitalist as a pensioner pays no regard to the fact that the capital system also introduced the new phenomenon of the ‘working rich’, who balance out ‘present enjoyment’ through the creation of value. Nor does it take into account that in the modern welfare and redistribution state, unproductiveness switches from the tip of society to the base – leading to the virtually unprecedented phenomenon of the parasitic poor. While it could normally be assumed in the agro-imperial world that the impoverished were exploited productive people, the paupers of the crystal palace – bearing the title of the unemployed – live more or less outside the sphere of value creation (and supporting them is less a matter of the ‘justice’ one naturally demands than one of national and human solidarity).7 Their functionaries, however, cannot refrain from asserting that they are exploited individuals who are lawfully entitled to compensation because of their hardships.
So, even if liberals and Marxists alike undertook far-reaching attempts in the nineteenth century to interpret the phenomenon of industrial society, the event of fossil energetics was not even perceived in either system, let alone conceptually penetrated. By making dogmatically inflated labour value the most important of all explanations for wealth, the dominant ideologies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remained chronically incapable of understanding that industrially extracted and utilized coal was not a ‘raw material’ like any other, but rather the first great agent of relief. It was thanks to this universal ‘natural worker’ (for which alchemists searched in vain for centuries) that the principle of abundance found its way into the hothouse of civilization.
Nonetheless, even if the pressure of new evidence convinces one to understand fossil energy carriers and the three generations of motors spawned by them – steam engines, combustion engines and electromotors – as the primary agents of relief in modernity, even if one goes so far as to welcome in them the genius benignus of a civilization beyond lack and muscular slavery, one cannot do away with the finding that the inevitable shift of exploitation in the fossil energy age has created a new proletariat whose suffering enables the relieved conditions in the palace of affluence. The main emphasis of the current exploitation has moved to livestock, for which the industrialization of farming brought about the age of massive production and use. On this subject, statistics are more informative than sentimental arguments: according to the German government's 2003 Animal Welfare Report, almost 400 million chickens were slaughtered in 2002, along with 31 million turkeys and nearly 14 million ducks; of large mammals, 44.3 million pigs, 4.3 million cows and 2.1 million sheep and goats met their final use. Analogous figures can be assumed in most market societies, not forgetting that the national statistics must be augmented by an enormous amount of imports. Animal proteins constitute the largest legal drug market. The monstrous scale of the figures exceeds any affective judgement – nor do analogies to the martial holocausts of the National Socialists, the Bolshevists and the Maoists fully reflect the unfathomable routines in the production and use of animal carcasses (I shall refrain from addressing the moral and metaphysical implications of comparing large-scale cases of human and animal exterminism). If one considers that intensive livestock farming rests on the agrochemically enabled, explosive growth of animal feed production, it becomes evident that the flooding of the markets with the meat of these animal bio-converters is a consequence of the oil floods unleashed in the twentieth century. ‘Ultimately we live on coal and petroleum – now that these have been transformed into edible products through industrial farming.’8 Under these conditions, one can predict a growing unease among the populations of the great hothouse in the coming century through an internationalized animal rights movement, already almost fully developed, that will emphasize the unbreakable connection between human rights and animal suffering.9 This movement could transpire as the vanguard of a development that assigns a new meaning to non-urban ways of life.
Thus, if one is to name the axis around which the revaluation of all values in our developed comfort civilization revolves, the only possible answer is the principle of abundance. Current abundance, which always demands to be experienced within the horizon of intensifications and dissolutions of boundaries, will undoubtedly remain the decisive hallmark of future conditions, even if the fossil energy cycle comes to an end a hundred years from now, or slightly thereafter. In broad terms, it is already clear which energy sources will enable a post-fossil era: primarily a spectrum of solar technologies and regenerative fuels. At the start of the twenty-first century, however, the details of the shape it will take are still undecided. We can only be sure that the new system – some simply call it the coming ‘global solar economy’ – will have to move beyond the compulsions and pathologies of current fossil resource policy.10
The solar system inevitably posits a revaluation of the revaluation of all values – and, as the turn towards current solar energy is putting an end to the frenzied consumption of earlier solar energy, one could speak of a partial return to the ‘old values’; for all old values were derived from the imperative of managing the energy that was renewed annually. Hence their deep connection to the categories of stability, necessity and lack. At the dawn of the second revaluation, we see the outlines of global civilizatory weather conditions that will quite probably display post-liberal qualities – they will install a hybrid synthesis of technological avant-gardism and eco-conservative moderation. (In terms of political colour symbolism: black-green.)11 The conditions for the ebullient expressionism of wastefulness in current mass culture will increasingly disappear.
In so far as the expectations created by the principle of abundance in the industrial era remain in force, technological research will have to devote itself first and foremost to finding sources for an alternative wastefulness. Future experiences of abundance will inevitably see a shift of emphasis towards immaterial streams, as ecosystemic factors preclude a constant ‘growth’ in the material domain. There will presumably be a dramatic reduction of material flow – and thus a revitalization of regional economies. Under such conditions, the time will come for the as yet premature talk of a ‘global information or knowledge society’ to prove its validity. The decisive abundances will then be perceived primarily in the almost immaterial realm of data streams. They alone will authentically possess the quality of globality.
At this point we can only vaguely predict how post-fossility will remould the present concepts of entrepreneurship and freedom of expression. It seems probable that from the vantage point of future ‘soft’ solar technologies, the romanticism of explosion – or, more generally speaking, the psychological, aesthetic and political derivatives of the sudden release of energy – will be judged in retrospect as the expressive world of a mass-culturally globalized energy fascism. This is a reflex of the helpless vitalism that springs from the poverty of perspectives in the fossil energy-based world system. Against this background, one understands why the culture scene in the crystal palace betrays a profound disorientation – beyond the aforementioned convergence of boredom and entertainment. The cheerful mass-cultural nihilism of the consumer scene is no less clueless and without future than the high-cultural nihilism of affluent private persons who assemble art collections to attain personal significance. For the time being, ‘high’ and ‘low’ will follow the maxim ‘Après nous le solaire.’
After the end of the fossil-energetic regime, there may de facto be what geopoliticians of the present have referred to as a shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific space. This turn would primarily bring about the change from the rhythm of explosions to that of regenerations. The Pacific style would have to develop the cultural derivatives of transition to the techno-solar energy regime. Whether this will simultaneously fulfil expectations regarding worldwide peace processes, the even distribution of planetary wealth and the end of global apartheid remains to be seen.